Saturday, December 31, 2005

Tracking wifi sites in Cleveland

Has anyone ever noticed the newspaper vending machine database that I have in my blog side bar? I'm afraid to click on it. I'm sure it stopped working months ago. It wasn't really easy to set up. It must have taken half an hour not including hours trying to find the necessary tools. Now with the explosion of google maps, creating a database of Cleveland Wifi locations should take about a minute.

Here's a list of several tools many of which are appropriate to varying degress. Take a look. I went through the entire list and experimented with all of them. Tagzania was the first one that I tried and ultimately it was the easiest and most appropriate. Incorporating it into the CleveWiki Project will involve embeding the map on a CleveWiki page (as I did above) and providing a link to Tagzania. Embedding the map on Clevewiki isn't something that came be done by a peon wikier. The same as embedding Upcoming.org events, it requires an iframe tag or a javascript tag. Both of these tags are prudently excluded from the wikiverse. An administrator will have create a special page for the map. Once that's done, people use the tagzania interface to add hotspot locations. The data will be automagically current at CleveWiki.

Of course, there's no reason to wait for CleveWiki admins to make the arrangements. Go straight to Tagzania and start adding hotspots now. Add them from the three lists linked above or, even better, add others that you know about. Your house, maybe? In order for them to show up on the map in this blog entry it's necessary that you tag your tagzania submissions with "cleveland" and "wifi".